


Live a Little (The Two Things That Kill You Every Time)

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Brick (2005)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-19
Updated: 2006-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:38:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1624694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ignorance, bliss, and the many-pronged path to a hell as sunlit as Southern California.   (contains mild femmeslash, drug use, and a bit of not-so-mild language)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Live a Little (The Two Things That Kill You Every Time)

**Author's Note:**

> I owe quite a bit, both in inspiration and section titles, for the always-brilliant Bob Dylan. Carolyn, I have to admit I was very excited to see you request both Dylan lyrics and an importance of setting in your story. I really enjoyed working those in. Much gratitude goes to NQDonne and Best Of Five for putting up with my constant messaging of sections as completed and to NQDonne for beta-reading the whole deal.
> 
> Written for Carolyn

 

 

**Live a Little (The Two Things That Kill You Every Time)**

_Laura: With Her Fog, Her Amphetamines and Her Pearls_

Laura Mercer has never gotten high. Sure, there's been a few loose j's blowing circles to the wind, the heady buzz of a glass of blood-red wine sipped off lips of lead crystal. But the real stuff, the powder that drove them all wild? It was a toy, and a game you only played to lose. She'd seen way too many people lose in her day and Laura Mercer? She played to win.

There's webs within webs in this twisted up world and no one knows where they lead to when the tangles unfurl, but Laura always figured the one with the sharpest blade would be the one to make it to the end of the tale. Maybe years later, in some four-year college retreat on the east coast, as the autumn leaves blow by her window and the count of bourbon-laced coffees edges past six or seven, she'll realize the futility of it all.

But at seventeen, rich and sly and pretty, edging up as close to death and ecstasy as possible without tainting her pretty little skin seems like as good a goal as anything.

Then there's Emily, ribbons and bows falling from her hair as she rests her head on Laura's shoulder and says "no, no, I want to." Always trying to descend another step deeper, as if the answer's lurking somewhere at the bottom, down with the fossils rotting beneath what became Los Angeles.

Maybe that's where she'll find it. Wouldn't that be a lark?

_Brendan: When Your Gravity Fails and Negativity Won't Pull You Through_

Jealousy's a rotten emotion. Boils in the core until everything but everything goes bad.

Jared wasn't a bad guy. No, he was a good guy. A nice guy. A soft guy in a hard world who just wanted to see a pretty girl smile.

Of course, thinks Brendan, mouth curling into the sort of smile that hurts around the edges, she was never his girl. Never could be and when he showed her the candle and the spoon, caramelized like sin over the flame, everything boiled over with the heroin.

The heat, the blood and the product mingling on the floor and Emily, fingers singed and screaming -- screaming and saying that she wasn't some porcelain doll to be put up in the entryway. She wasn't for looking and keeping, but living and being and maybe, Brendan, maybe even fucking once in awhile.

And Jared looks up all blood and ugly from the floor, and he smiles. And he laughs, and Brendan -- Brendan boils.

"I'm sorry, Emily," he says as he pushes his partner up -- hard -- against the wall.

Bang goes the echo of body on hollow; snap goes the whole situation.

From then on, it's all pretending until everything falls apart.

_Emily: Starry-Eyed and Laughing as I Recall When We Were Caught_

Towns spill into towns, maybe capped into a skyline by a mall or two. The only way to tell one burg from another is the color streamers blowing in the breeze behind three-year-old Camrys on Homecoming week. There's certain things that hold true up and down the Five, though. The dizzying spin of squared off block, the parking lots and the squat little houses. The nocturnal dance of the sensor-signal traffic lights.

And the pretty neighborhoods, with two or three stories and grass green even in the scalding August sun, rising on the hillside over each and every Albertson's and Ross Dress for Less.

As a little girl in Cleveland, Emily Costich used to daydream about Southern California. The dreams and the stars and the jingle jangle of the classic songs. She wasn't the sort of silly girl who hoped of hitting the big time, all chandeliers and champagne and lying half-prostrate atop a grand piano. No, she was just looking for a little bit of sunlight, a little bit of starshine.

She was thirteen when her father took a transfer to the Irvine office and she stepped off the plane at John Wayne Airport dreaming of matinee heroes or, at the very least, a bit more life than Mrs. Leary's math class. It was the end of July and the sky was weighed down beneath the exhaust and the summertime heat. She called it fog, she called it mist, she waited for it to pass. But it was grime, dirt and haze, and the dream seemed so much fuzzier and further as she lifted her head off the daydream desk and looked up at the sun.

_The Brain: You're Invisible Now, You Got No Secrets to Conceal_

His parents must have thought he was a joke, not a child. Another plaything out in the Orange County hills, a glamorous accoutrement and not another fucking kid, borne onto the world with screams and legs spread across the grave. He imagined them dosed half to heaven laughing until it hurt like hell, planning to name their kid after a rock star who drowned in his own swimming pool.

No one ever said anything, back when they were kids. But the parents would give a little look to Mr. and Mrs. Jones when they came to pick him up from the nursery school. "Ah, yes, Brian was very good today and I love the Stones, too, don't you?"

No, when the kids started giving him the hard times that kids do onto others since time unknown, they flipped the vowels and called him "brain."

He hated it. Everyone knew the smart kid was the lost cause, the one sitting alone fascinated by his math problems and his fingernails. He was six years old, but his babysitter the TV set had already shown him that much, and how.

He hollered all hell when they called him that. He fought back with the dirtiest words he knew, and threats of the old confederate rifle his father kept in the attic, but none of the six year olds had any inkling what he was going on about, so they kept at it until they forgot who he really was, before the taunts and clever comebacks.

And so he sat alone, and thought about how stupid they were, and how useless, and wasn't there something a little bit different, a little bit interesting about being named after a guy who had everything and did himself in in a swimming pool, in the sunlight of his youth and pleasure.

_Laura_

Maybe it'd make for a better tale if Laura fell and fell hard. If Emily's baby blues and innocent smile touched something in her heart, made for the grand thump-thump, heedless of responsibility, and shined a light in the tunnel until the credits rolled, tinseltown-style.

That's not to say it wasn't hands-off through and through. Laura went with Brad Bramish in those days, but sometimes she went places he didn't. It was just the way things were, and things went the usual way with Emily. She was a good girl, a pretty girl, an eager girl and the night gets lonely when Ma and Pa are back from Maui and enforcing no boys after hours with all the precision of a sergeant on the war front.

Emily, however -- Emily fit in, with only the vaguest hint that maybe she didn't or shouldn't. With the father who did accounting up at Edwards, counting Chinese women who sewed pig hearts into something palatable, something that maybe beat like human. Laura's parents found it respectable enough and Laura, well, she found it fascinating.

The little quirk in the individual muddled in with the sprawl, maybe interesting enough on a sunny day or a cloudy night to be worth the drive back to the valley.

Laura blows a circle of smoke onto Emily's bare chest. "Nasty habit," she says as she takes another drag.

Emily smiles, eyes white, light like the moon and blank as she laughs. "I've got enough nasty habits," she says, warm and fuzzy, "and you're one of them."

Laura taps the ashes out into a crystal wine glass. There's a bit of Beaujolais floating blood-red against the stem-top, but it wasn't worth drinking anyway. "Do you love me, Emily?" she says, her voice airy and oddly detached.

"No," says Emily. Quickly, too quickly. She's spilled her hand again, in a game where bluffing's half the contest.

Laura laughs. Stubs out her cigarette and smiles her predator smile. "Are you happy?"

The high's fading, but there's still a bit of mindless bliss left before daylight of the hangover. "Ecstatic," says Emily, and kisses her, tongue and taste and dreaming and Laura wonders if she'll ever be that happy.

_The Brain_

Brendan Frye, onetime black hat gone white and pasty, throws his tray down at the table one Thursday afternoon. Another kid from the playgroup, gone down the same path as any other, the one that leads to face-down in the swimming pool.

Almost on instinct, The Brain pulls his back, leaving just a smidge of room at the other end of the sun-faded plastic.

"I'm not asking you to pull out the welcome wagon or make some great show of emotion," says Brendan. "I just don't hate you already, is all."

"I'll consider it a kindness," The Brain replies, though he doesn't, not really.

"You see anything over here, when no one thinks you're looking?"

"Kara Seeley's found a new freshman. Bet that breaks your tender little heart."

"If we're going to work this arrangement, I'd appreciate your not mentioning it. We've all been hungry in someone else's world once or twice along the way."

"Arrangement?" He raises an eyebrow.

"There's going to be trouble going down. The veeps and the bulls have their nose down to Jared. Letting you know so you can keep yours clean and owe me one under the table. Could use an eye or two at my back."

"Right, Sam Spade, what's in it for me except the sight of your Sunday smile."

"Anyone with half a mind knows your folks didn't name you after some dosed out rock star to teach you a lesson. Fortunately for you, most people can't remember back nearly to the second grade and don't have half a mind left even if they could."

The Brain starts away, lifts his lunch tray from the table. "You threatening me?"

A hand on the tray, the overcooked green beans stop shaking and land serene. "Thought maybe you could use a friend."

The Brain takes a breath. "Yeah, yeah, I could. So when's this going down with Jared?"

"Too late, too late," says Brendan, but they both make a good chunk of change that day nonetheless.

_Emily_

Emily. Well, Emily bites it at the hand of her own desperation, and if you haven't figured that one by now, I've got a castle to sell you in Cleveland.

_Brendan_

Brendan used to get high. Time was, he dosed the jake two, three nights a week and made for more than a bit of a reef worm the rest of the time. The world grew fuzzy at the edges except for one sharp, pretty girl. She loved him, he loved her, end of story and cue the orchestra, sing the refrain.

But the girl fell away like cheaply-built Hollywood scenery and all that was left was the glare of the floodlights in his eye. He wasn't no theater boy on his knees for the ingénue and this wasn't his life, blitzed out half past noon like a deer in headlights.

It hurt something awful, clean of the high and the warmth of her arms, but there was nowhere going back once the ways parted. It was cold in the shade of the field house, eating lunch alone or thereabouts, but at least it wouldn't get colder.

Laura nearly found him once, tracked his movements even as he got hot on hers. But he held his ground as he remembered Emily, ribbons in her hair and hair tangled in the drainage ditch outside of town.

Laura's chin fit nicely in his fingers, and her kiss tasted like Emily used to, once you got past the cigarettes.

But Laura played her game, dosed up in sweet caresses. So he played, too, since he knew by now to look for answers, not the short way down.

They said goodbye in four-letter words on a dark sad night, on the football field in the off-season. Dying sunlight and the crescendo of far-away sirens of bulls maybe only imagined.

He turns to her, and makes to kiss her goodbye. The sunlight's fading over the Pacific, three rings of suburbs and a cliffside highway away. Somewhere, someone's driving a cheap Japanese import along the horizon and marveling at the view, ignoring the threat of the precipice. He holds her tight and says his goodbye.

"Two things'll kill you every time, doll: love and the junk. Haven't figured out which'll kill you faster, but when I do, I'll give you a holler."

 


End file.
